The Chilling Thing An Industry Insider Said About Glyphosate, GMOs, And Why He Sold His Conventional Seeds Company

Dan Romig, who along with his father co-founded Trigen Seed LLC in 1993 and bloodstresold to Limagrain Cereal Seeds in 2010, is an insider in the seeds industry. His father was head of R&D at Northrup King, a subsidiary of Syngenta, which Monsanto is currently trying to acquire.

The combined Monsanto-Syngenta behemoth would control a third of the globe’s seed and pesticides markets.

Among the controversies surrounding Roundup, Monsanto’s flagship product, and largest selling weed killer in the world, there is this one: the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a component of the UN’s World Health Organization, declared that glyphosate, one of the active ingredients in Roundup, is “probably carcinogenic.”

Don Quijones, in his article on WOLF STREET, Monsanto Bites Back, vivisected the implications of the Monsanto-Syngenta deal and issues surrounding glyphosate.

Dan Romig then commented on the article from his insider point of view, and in doing so also told the story of his company and why they ended up selling it. It’s a chilling, insightful, and important read:

By Dan Romig:

Glyphosate is now being used by grain producers to desiccate their fields before harvest. Four days before running the combine, growers spray their fields to kill weeds and their plants in order to have an easier harvest. But in so doing, glyphosate then enters the final product (wheat, barley, oats, and others). Almost every human being has it in their bloodstream.

Dr. Stephanie Seneff [Senior Research Scientist at MIT] has led the way in research on what this does to a person. As glyphosate gets into the digestive tract, it kills much of the beneficial bacteria and produces intestinal permeability, or ‘leaky gut syndrome.’ It also chelates minerals such as aluminum, and then ‘cages’ the aluminum which goes into the bloodstream, and finally ends up in the pineal gland. Look at the correlation between when RoundUp was invented in 1970, put into mass use around 1979 and then unleashed into GMO crops in the late 1990’s, and the rise in Alzheimer’s and autism among other neurological disorders.

Ironically, before my father and I started a conventional wheat seed genetics company in 1993, Trigen Seed LLC, he was head of R & D at Northrup King (a Syngenta subsidiary) and started the Bt corn program which entered the market in 1996 along with Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready corn and beans.

In the 18 years we worked breeding new hard red spring wheat varieties in the traditional manner of making crosses between two different parents, we watched technology jump ahead. Now, even non-GMO food sources are bred using double haploid breeding and single seed descent technology. What that does is provide the breeder with a much more homozygous genetic structure of the first generation of seeds that are produced from crossing two different parents. This is now used in private industry (Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer Crop Science and Limagrain to name a few), and by Universities that have Agriculture programs.

We sold Trigen to Limagrain in 2010 because this technology was needed to compete and unavailable to our small family business.

What we eat affects our health. It is practically impossible to avoid Big Ag & Big Food GMOs, antibiotics and hormones. The USDA just approved Dow’s “Enlist Duo” which combines glyphosate and 2,4-D for a new class of toxic GMOs that will soon be in your bloodstream. By Dan Romig.

And here is the original article by Don Quijones, Monsanto Bites Back.

Source:http://wolfstreet.com/2015/05/26/chilling-thing-an-industry-insider-said-about-glyphosate-gmos-why-he-sold-his-conventional-seeds-company-monsanto-syngenta/

Reposted with permission